Pat McGovern died this week at 76 in Palo Alto totally surprising me because I didn’t even know he had been ill. Uncle Pat, as we called him, was the founder of Computerworld back in 1967 and the year before that research firm International Data Corp., started in his suburban Boston kitchen. Pat helped turn the computer business into an industry and employed a lot of people along the way including me. He was an exceptional person and I’d like to tell you why.

Pat ran a company that published about 200 computer magazines all over the world. Each December he traveled the globe to give holiday bonuses to every employee he could find. The bonuses were a meaningful amount of crisp cash money in an envelope that Pat would hold in his hand until he’d finished his little speech about how much he appreciated your work. And here’s the amazing part: he knew what we did. He read the magazine, whichever one it was, and knew your contribution to it. You’d get a smile and a handshake and 3-4 sentences about something you had written or done and then would come the envelope and Pat would be on to the next cube.

This by itself is an amazing thing for an executive to do — traveling all month to hand out 3000 envelopes and doing it for more than 30 years. Does your CEO do that?

But wait, there’s more!

When I was fired 18 years ago by InfoWorld Pat knew about it. It was a big enough deal that someone told him and he didn’t stop it because he trusted his executives to do the right thing. But when it became clear after months of rancor and hundreds of thousands in legal bills that it hadn’t been the right thing Pat and I met in a hotel suite in New York, hand wrote an agreement and he offered me back my old job.

I couldn’t do it, but we stayed in touch. Pat invested in a startup of mine (it failed). He made a stalking horse offer for my sister’s business getting her a better deal in the process. He always took my calls and always answered my e-mail. And when he did he always threw-in 3-4 sentences to show that he had been reading or watching my work.

We weren’t close by any means, but we respected each other.

There is something important in this about how people can work together, something I hope you find today in your organization. I never worked for Pat McGovern. I was always down in the engine room, shoveling words. But Pat knew about the engine room, understood its importance, and realized that the people down there were people and he ought to try to know them. The result was great loyalty, a better product, and a sense of literal ownership in the company that I retain today almost two decades later.

It wasn’t perfect. The guy let me be fired! But he was the only one who ever apologized for it and that takes a big man.

This is really a textbook example of leadership, just as your blog is a textbook example of sharing!

I never had the luck to work for anyone like him…

Thanks Bob, you are the best!

Dr John
March 21, 2014 at 4:44 am

One less good guy in the world.

Ted
March 21, 2014 at 4:53 am

“…traveling all month to hand out 3000 envelopes and doing it for more than 30 years. Does your CEO do that?” Nice tribute to an unsung but visionary tech pioneer & leader. As one in the engine room too, I looked forward to and was amazed by those visits.

I’m sorry to hear of this loss. He certainly sounds like an exceptional man. May his memory always be a blessing to you.

John
March 21, 2014 at 5:04 am

I am sorry the loss of a good boss and supporter.
.
A couple years ago for IBM’s 100th birthday the company held parties all over the country and world. It was a surreal experience. It was like a family reunion where all the family members were estranged. People would meet and then there would be an awkward silence when they didn’t know what to say next. For the 100th birthday the company announced it was giving everyone stock options. Instead of seeing lots of smiles, there were many long faces. Many people knew they’d be gone before they could exercise those options. It was an empty gift. Most people hadn’t seen a real pay raise in years. What they wanted to see was real cash, now. The company was the most profitable in its history and all it could offer was a gift most people couldn’t use.
.
The world needs more stories about good companies and good bosses. Thanks for sharing yours with us. Again I am sorry for the loss of a good boss and supporter.

Northern_kid
March 21, 2014 at 5:44 am

I worked in advertising sales at InfoWorld back in the late 80’s. Sat in a meeting with Pat trying to figure out how to change the advertising sections (back of the rag) to generate more revenue. Nice gentleman who listened. Sad news indeed.

Steven White
March 21, 2014 at 5:48 am

What I would like to know (don’t tell me, it’s none of my business) is why you got fired. When the office Infoworld came around your column was the second thing I read, right behind the column from Nicholas Petreley. It sounds like a boneheaded thing to do to get rid of you. Maybe boneheadedness is just standard procedure outside the engine room.

Don Danbury
March 21, 2014 at 9:48 am

I bet it was over ownership of the Robert X Cringely name.

Robert X. Cringely
March 21, 2014 at 9:57 am

Nope. I never did anything that I wasn’t contractually allowed to do. I was fired — honest to God — for being too successful.

DCWhatthe
March 21, 2014 at 7:04 am

My boss just sent us all an email, letting us know what an inspiration Pat was.

76 is too young for productive people to go away, in this day & age.

Chad
March 21, 2014 at 8:10 am

My director sent the news article to all the ITS employees with an opening statement: “In honor of the man, Pat McGovern, who helped nurture my inner Geek, I thought this worth sharing: ” – well done article and a truly caring sounding person. Glad to know there has been people like this in the world. I day I hope to meet someone that believes what Pat did.

RJ
March 21, 2014 at 9:13 am

The company won’t be the same without Pat around.

Michael Tillapaugh
March 21, 2014 at 10:24 am

It is always nice, though very rare, to read something that someone has actually seemed to put their heart into, slightly diminished though it may be.

Ed Scannell
March 21, 2014 at 10:33 am

Thanks for letting people know what sort of man Patrick J. McGovern was, Bob. Anyone, not just tech publishers, aspiring to start up a company today need only look at the blueprint Pat laid down for IDG including The Ten Corporate Values he held so dearly. (During some of those December visits he might ask an employee to recite one or two, just to keep us on our toes). He was a great man in our industry doing more to educate people not just in the US but truly around the world through the 300 publications he launched. He was the best at what he did. And you weren’t so damn bad yourself.

Yeah too bad there’s not more like him. My sense it’s the difference between a founder who helps bring on all those people, even if indirectly, and some outside hack brought in usually to manage expenses. The founder is trying to grow the business while the hack is trying to “manage” the business. It’s Peopleware vs. Upstairs, Downstairs.

John
March 21, 2014 at 10:46 am

Having been a member of InfoWorld’s advisory board, I think things started going down hill around the time Mr. Cringely left. He wasn’t the reason of the decline, just one of the victims. The new leadership wrecked the place and after a couple years it was a shadow of its former self.
.
Bob I think you made the right decision not to return. It was better that you branched out and did more good things on your own. The new leadership at InfoWorld would have pulled you down with their sinking ship.
.
I remember 20 years ago if you were in the IT business, InfoWorld was a MUST READ publication. I cannot remember the last time I read anything from them. It is sad they fell so far.

Wow, sad news — but a happy memory! I was once, very briefly, one of those stringers in the engine room (NeXTWorld!), and I too appreciated his tenacity in building a print empire even if I’d never met the guy. I’m glad to hear his impact is fondly remembered. Thanks for sharing…

1. Remain dedicated to our mission of providing exceptional information services on information technology
2. Show respect for the dignity of each individual
3. Invest in our people through training and career development
4. Produce products of the highest quality
5. Strive for excellence in customer service
6. Keep close to our customers and qualified prospects
7. Be responsive to changes in our marketplace
8. Keep the corporate staff lean
9. Encourage autonomy through a decentralized management style via locally managed business units
10. Foster an action-oriented “Let’s try it” attitude

Jeremy Hagan
March 21, 2014 at 2:03 pm

Great column. As an engine room worker I have known what you said in this article to be true for a long time and I always wonder why most CEO’s don’t. Then I remember that they’re psychopaths and it makes me feel OK to not be one.

Mr. McGovern sounds like a great man. I was an InfoWorld reader back in the day, and enjoyed at least something about almost every issue. One thing I did *not* enjoy was the prevalence of “H1-b qualifier(*)” ads that I saw. After about 6 months from the first time I noticed that (when I was looking for a job), I terminated my subscription.
.
I wonder if Pat McGovern knew about those.
.
(*)For those who haven’t heard the term: An H1-b qualifier is an ad run for the sole purpose of “proving” that there is no “qualified” US Citizen available to take a job, which has already been filled by a foreign national anyway. Back in those days, they just copied the resume of the current holder of the job, complete with non-bona-fide requirements like “must speak Mandarin” and an insultingly low salary. A few of those got slapped hard enough that they aren’t quite as blatant about it anymore, but you still see job requirements on places like Monster and Dice with a long list of inflexible requirements which are rarely possessed by a single individual, along with a salary or contract rate lower than I was making in the 1990’s. Those are either H1-b qualifiers, or the submission of exceptionally mindless HR drones who are unable to distinguish form from substance.

Paul
March 23, 2014 at 11:55 pm

That’s the problem with modern America, anyone can be fired an time for no good reason, only in America is this a problem
Not even Victorian England is this bad, no where any time is as bad as the us

Ken
March 24, 2014 at 12:07 am

Wow…what a sweet story. One of the “giants” of the industry. Hearing it gives me great nostalgia for what I’m afraid is becoming a different (and lost) type of leadership compared to what we have today in our industry.

Many of these great pioneers (of which Cringely has written so eloquently) had this personal interaction touch. They didn’t attempt to have their most superlative moments thru texting, Skyping, tweeting, instagramming, “friending” or whatever type of virtual contact that subsitutes nowadays for the real thing. Whether they were screaming and cussing you out and making you feel low, or praising you while handing you a wad of cash, they looked you in the eye, face-to-face, when they did it.

They understood the human component…and rather than trying to find a way to work around it, they knew that it was everything. I wonder if perhaps we’ve lost that essence of leadership that was so much a part of our industry from its birth thru the end of the 20th century.

Adam Luoranen
March 24, 2014 at 4:22 am

Forgive me for being another cynic pouring cold water on all these warm feelings, but I can’t help but feel like this whole envelope story is compensating for something else. Whenever I see high-level management doing this kind of thing–personally going to employees one by one and giving them all words of encouragement–it’s usually because management has decided to give the employees less money than they expect (or deserve), and they’re hoping that all of this fuzzy handshake-and-a-smile stuff will help people forget that they’re being underpaid for the work they did. Bob has acknowledged here that the payouts in question were “a meaningful amount,” which suggests that that probably wasn’t the case with Pat McGovern, but at least most of the time when I’ve seen this sort of thing happen in my own personal experience, it’s out of senior management’s embarrassment that they can’t (or won’t) come up with the green, and are trying the carrot instead of the stick to avoid a mass exodus. No doubt McGovern was a great man, but people shouldn’t assume that a CEO walking around and saying nice things will make up for undercompensating employees.

Adam, you’re making assumptions that just aren’t true. This is my second tour at IDG. The first one was from 1983 to 1986. In 1983, Pat McGovern was personally handing out cash, making rounds and talking to every employee. He did so every year for more than 30 years. For those who got to know the man, he was genuine, inquisitive, intelligent, insightful and decisive. He treated everyone who worked at IDG with respect. There was no corporate/PR veneer in the man. He wasn’t compensating for something; he was being himself, leading his company the best way he knew how. I guess we can forgive you your cynicism, because men like Pat McGovern are few and far between. Perhaps you’ve never come across one. But I think if you talk to any IDG employee past or present, you’ll find general agreement. People with honor really do exist in this world. Pat McGovern exemplified that.

Adam Luoranen
March 25, 2014 at 5:54 am

Thank you, Scot, I appreciate that. Obviously I didn’t know Pat McGovern and couldn’t judge him or his motives from this single article. From everything that I’ve read here, it seems that he was indeed a great man, and if he truly was a manager with no element of PR spin in his persona, then he was indeed the rarest of managers. I certainly didn’t intend to attack Pat McGovern, a man whom I’d never even met, based on hearsay; the point of my comment was more a caution to other managers who might read this article of Bob’s and think that they can disingenuously try to work similar tactics into their management as a way of motivating underpaid employees. At the end of the day, people usually still fundamentally go to work because they want the money, but there is always a place in any enterprise for sincerity and humanity, and if Pat McGovern maintained these in his management, then I salute him as a role model for his peers.

Robert Haddock
March 24, 2014 at 10:04 pm

In the early 80’s I worked at Ziff-Davis. Bill Ziff and Pat McGovern were serious competitors. I worked some on the acquisition of PC magazine by Ziff Davis. All the editorial staff at PC magazine thought they were going to lots of money when Ziff purchased it, but alas, they did not. So the whole staff promptly walked out the door and Pat funded them instantly to start PC World. Pat and Bill spent serious money on lawyers duking it out over this issue. In the following years I had dinner with Pat a couple of times, and he once tried to get me to come up to Boston, but I was happy with Ziff and later Citibank.
Five years ago I was in Shenzhen, China at the High Tech Fair, the largest tech conference in China. At the annual gala dinner I walked around and noticed a table that said “IDG.” I struck up a conversation with the lady standing there, and mentioned that I knew her boss. She said “He’s right there behind you.” I turned around and there was Pat, whom I had not seen in 20+ years, white hair, looking very fit. I introduced myself to him and it took 30 seconds and then he remembered me and laughed. He said, with a note of regret, “It’s so sad that Bill (Ziff) died recently. What a great guy he was.” I had to hide how startled I was, and then I realized that the two of them, mortal enemies at times, respected each other and both fought a good fight. We talked for 20 minutes and told stories about the “good old days” in the early 80’s (especially a great story he told me about the kidnapping of Drake Lundell, founding editor of Computer World, whom Bill had hired away from Pat, and whom I had worked closely with at Ziff for awhile) and towards the end of the conversation I said, “What an amazing time that was at the beginning of the PC industry.” Pat looked at me, and with a twinkle in his eyes, said “Just like today.” Here he was, in his 70’s, thinking about what an amazing time we are living in and how many opportunities we face today. His attitude has been an inspiration to me. It was a remarkable meeting with a remarkable man.

bobsmyhero
March 25, 2014 at 7:33 pm

“WhatsApp is the first of several big acquisitions for Facebook” – RX Cringely, Feb 20,2014

-Our Bobby nails it again.

Pdurao
March 26, 2014 at 6:28 am

No matter how great a company you still get fired in the us with not even a trial or defence which a common criminal gets

Joshua
March 28, 2014 at 8:33 pm

I fully support at-will employment. Its called freedom of association, which also includes the right (absent a contract) to NOT associate with someone. Being fired, laid off, or otherwise involuntarily separated sucks, (hey, I have been there), but it is fundamentally no different than when a customer decides to stop shopping at a certain store. How would you like to be forced to continue buying a product you no longer needed?

Ronc
March 29, 2014 at 4:34 pm

Thanks for injecting some common sense so eloquently. I’m not familiar with the employment rules of other countries, but I’m sure they also have effective ways to incentivize their population to remain productive. Otherwise people could work hard in school to get a good job and then take the rest of their life off. Of course if a company had a reputation for abusing their freedom of association rights, they would not be sought by potential employees.

David Raths
March 26, 2014 at 4:17 pm

Hi Bob,
I was very sad to hear about Pat McGovern’s passing. But while I certainly agree with your comments about the value of his efforts to reach out to employees, I have to admit I always felt uncomfortable as he came around the InfoWorld offices handing out bonus checks. To me, it felt a little like the troops being inspected by a three-star general. It was difficult to establish much rapport or small talk in that one-minute chat. But you certainly have to admire his accomplishments and demeanor as well as the autonomy he granted to far-flung units to experiment. That, along with all the strange and smart employees, made it a fun place to work!

I just returned from Pat’s small service at his home in California. Everyone who spoke said the same things about a beautiful human being. Pat was always positive, thoughtful, sharp as a tack, and cared deeply about family, friends and those who worked with him. God bless Pat McGovern and those who will study and follow his example and thereby build better businesses and a better world. W.Welch, Sausalito, California